silly me i'm glad i came back to my senses.

I find, however, that his refusal to rely on pat plot devices and easy climaxes make his stories all the more unsettling and harder to forget.Īs far as my love for genre fiction goes, college did a number on me and for many years i scorned my old high school loves of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Some devotees of the classic ghost story may be disappointed by his denouements, for often his hauntings are vague, his endings inconclusive and puzzling. The atmosphere of each of these tale rings true, and suggests a wealth of ancillary themes, but Aickman, although he develops his themes expertly, never loses track of his central duty: to dismay and disturb, to frighten and appall. In this collection, for example, we take journeys to: a shabby little English town with a sleazy fair, an island off the Normandy coast with an odd ecclesiastical legend, a Ruritanian duchy with a mysterious lake, a Romantic glimpse of early 19th century Ravenna which displays at least one vampire (and in which Byron and Shelly make one brief appearance), an out-of-the-way English rehabilitation center with unorthodox rules, the back pathways of no-longer-rural Southern Surrey menaced by a yellow dog, and a couple of London neighborhoods, one urban and run-down and one lower-middle-class. Whereas the Master specialized in a few settings (the ancient English cathedral or university town, the rare book auction or library, the academic gentleman's holiday trip, etc.), Aickman is an expert at creating a wealth of distinct settings which he articulates with precision in order to elicit distinctive and disturbing atmospheres. Robert Aickman is the best modern writer of supernatural stories, as great as-perhaps greater than-the Master himself, M.R. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ( Pages from a Young Girl's Journal) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.Ĭold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. The story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. Cold Hand in Mine was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977.

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman